Extra, Extra Read all about it: Danny Sullivan’s Search Engine Land Launches December 11
Search Engine Land is a new search news blog launching December 11, 2006. Danny Sullivan along with Chris Sherman and Barry Schwartz (RustyBrick), will be providing information about search engine marketing and how search engines work in general, from a searcher’s perspective.
To read more please visit the Search Engine Land website at searchengineland.com
November 29th, 2006
A recent survey by Akamai concluded that online shoppers are likely to abandon a website if it takes longer than four seconds to load.
Of the 1058 people involved in the study, 75% of the respondants said they would not return to websites that took longer than four second to load. The time involved in order to load a page, came second to high prices and shipping costs in the online shoppers main gripes.
Akamai’s consulted a number of people who shopped regularly online to find out the best and worst aspects to online shopping, and what they liked and disliked most about e-retailing. The majority of the mature net-shoppers (who had been shopping online” for more than two years and spent more than $1500 a year online) ranked page loading times as their main priority.
It found that one-third of those surveryed abandoned sites that took time to load, were hard to navigate or took too long to handle the checkout and purchase process. E-Gain New Media recently put this theory further to the test by “streamlining” a well known PC manufacturers order process to co-incide with their UK SEO campaign, with spectacular results, with an increase of 140% in sales.
The four-second threshold is just under half the time of previous research (6 seconds), conducted during the early days of the web-shopping boom, which also suggested that shoppers would wait for a site to finish loading. With the advent of broadband, this perception is rapidly changing.
It should also be noted that roughly 30% of those survey said they formed a “negative perception” of a company with site was badly put-together site and would go as far as telling their family and friends about their experiences. Further research by Akamai concluded that nearly half of the top 500 US online shopping sites took longer than the four-second threshold to finish loading.
For the record:
The survey questioned 1,058 net shoppers during the first six months of 2006. Consultants Jupiter Research did the survey for Akamai.
November 15th, 2006
Clickriver; a new advertising programme from Amazon, which allows businesses to place sponsored links on Amazon.com next to search results and on product details pages is currently in beta testing and Amazon are currently inviting advertisers from a range of service providers and retailers.
The ClickRiver adverts were built by A9.com, a search technologies subsidiary of Amazon, and are similar in nature to Google Adwords (the sponsored search (PPC) service from Google). Clickriver allows advertisers to purchase sponsored links for complementary services and products based on an Amazon user`s search results. For example, a travel agent may purchase ads when a search is performed for books on Spain.The pricing model will be on a pay per click basis. The amount bid will determine how the ads are ranked and what the cost will be if the ad is clicked.
The service will undoubtedly appeal to advertisers as it allows them to get their products and services in front of customers who are ready to purchase.
November 7th, 2006
Just been playing around with Google Co-op and must say its come along alot since I first started playing around with it. THere are a nunber of features including:
- The ability to create your own custom search engine, much like E-Gain’s Online Marketing Search Engine
- The ability to deliver specialised search results
- The ability to help users refine their searches
To read more about Google Co-op, go to http://www.google.com/coop/
November 2nd, 2006
